Medical research depends on animal experimentation which demands large numbers of animals, such as mice, rats, guinea pigs, and so on. Depending on the nature of the project animals may be housed singly or in multiples in each cage. In either case, a container for water is usually essential for each cage. In the past and to some extent even today this problem was addressed by providing a rubber stopper with a through hole, inserting a specially designed stainless steel tube in the hole, and inserting the rubber stopper into a suitable glass or plastic water bottle. Obvious problems with reliability and labor considerations led to the growing use of metal or plastic screw caps to replace the rubber stoppers, and matching threaded neck water bottles. While this provided reliable animal watering devices the lab technician was still faced with dealing with perhaps thousands of bottles each day. Each bottle cap has to be unscrewed to remove the cap, the bottle emptied of remaining water, filled with fresh water, and finally the cap resecured. This tedious work is not only boring and costly, but can lead to physical injury such as carpal tunnel syndrome. It has been estimated that repetitive motion of this kind can lead to worker complaints costing up to $15,000 per complaint in terms of lost productivity, disability, and medical costs.
To address this tedious problem of uncapping, dumping, and recapping bottles a variety of automated animal water bottle handling systems have been devised, including mechanical and computer programmed. These systems are currently commercially available for large scale animal requirements. However, for smaller research requirements the problem persists. The present invention provides a solution by providing a simple, economical hand held water bottle decapping and recapping system specifically for those applications still depending on objectionable manual operations.
It is therefore a primary object of the present invention to provide a system for capping and decapping bottles with a hand held mechanism.
An additional object of the present invention is to fill the gap between automatic and manual bottle capping and decapping procedures.
A further object of the invention is to speed up the installation and removal of caps on water bottles.
Still another object of the invention is to minimize or eliminate physical injury to workers, such as carpal tunnel syndrome.
Yet another object of the invention is to provide a consistent and predetermined torque of each cap so as to minimize leakage.